It was a magnificent, late-summer morning in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

There wasn't a cloud in the sky. The Yankees were atop the American League East with a 13-game lead over the second-place Boston Red Sox. The top box-office draws were Peter Hyams' "The Musketeer" and the romantic comedy "Two Can Play That Game."

And at the World Trade Center, the staff at Borders and Sam Goody were preparing for a busy day, with Jay-Z's "The Blueprint," Nickelback's "Silver Side Up," Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft" and Mariah Carey's "Glitter" soundtrack all slated for release that day.

Glassnote Entertainment Group founder/CEO Daniel Glass, at the time president of Artemis Records, had gone for a run before getting ready to go to work at the label's offices on West 18th Street. As he emerged from the Union Square subway station at mid-morning, he immediately noticed something was wrong. "Thousands of people were staring downtown," he recalls. "Until that day, I didn't realize you could see the World Trade Center towers from there."

Up by Times Square at RCA Records' headquarters on 1540 Broadway, then-RCA chairman/North America CEO Bob Jamieson was watching a TV report about a plane crash at the World Trade Center when he realized that he would have a clear view of lower Manhattan from the other end of the hall. Once there, he saw that the top of the North Tower was enveloped in smoke.

"I was standing there looking out the window at the World Trade Center and then saw the next plane fly into the other tower," Jamieson recalls. "As it hit, I literally fell backward into a chair."

About an hour later, J&R Music & Computer World corporate sales manager Marty Singer was standing outside the downtown Manhattan store by City Hall, paralyzed with horror as he saw people leaping out of the stricken Twin Towers.

Suddenly, the South Tower buckled and began to crumble. A massive cloud of black smoke and dust began expanding out from the site toward the store. "It was pitch black like midnight and coming straight at us," Singer says.

A half hour later, the hellish scene repeated itself when the North Tower fell.

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Before long, TV networks relayed the news that other hijacked planes had crashed into the Pentagon and an empty field near Shanksville, Pa. As the magnitude of the terrorist attacks became apparent, concern quickly turned to those who may have been caught in the mayhem.

Newbury Comics CEO Mike Dreese flew out of Boston's Logan International Airport that morning on a Miami-bound American Airlines flight. Dreese's plane landed 45 minutes after one of the two hijacked planes from Logan-United Airlines Flight 175-hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

"Everyone was relieved to hear from me because they had heard that planes from Boston had been hijacked," recalls Dreese, who says he called his wife as soon as he landed.

Dreese and other executives were headed for NARM's retailer conference in Miami, where J&R president/co-CEO Rachelle Friedman was receiving conflicting reports of what was happening back in New York. At one point, she heard that the store had been destroyed in the attacks, which she was relieved to hear later that day wasn't true. Because all U.S. commercial flights were grounded, Friedman asked her brother in Florida to drive her home, where she arrived late Wednesday night.

By then, city emergency personnel had taken over J&R's computer store and its main store as staging areas for their rescue and recovery efforts.

"They had called us up and asked, 'If we drop off 30,000 body bags, would your store have room to handle that?'" Friedman recalls. "You get a request like that and you just answer, 'Yes.'"

It later turned out there was no need for tens of thousands of body bags, one of many wrong assumptions that emerged from the confusing aftermath of the attacks.

Those with friends and family members who worked at the World Trade Center checked hospitals and later put up posters in search of their loved ones. Among them was Island Def Jam's New York staff, which sent its street team to lower Manhattan to post photos of Matthew O'Mahony, the husband of then-IDJ senior VP of publicity Lauren Murphy and a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald who worked in the North Tower.

"There was a common hope," Glass says, "that your loved one got hit in the head and might be in a daze wandering around or was knocked out in the hospital."

But for many people, their worst fears were realized. Former Walt Disney consumer products senior VP Carolyn Beug and Backstreet Boys roadie Danny Lee, who were both in the plane that hit the North Tower; Jane Simpkin, a member of ASCAP's Northeast music licensing team who was on the plane that hit the South Tower; and O'Mahony and Cantor Fitzgerald colleague Michael Andrews, the brother of then-Billboard circulation director Jeanne Jamin, were among the more than 2,700 people who died in the attacks.

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